Informative Mini-Books!

We have begun a new writing unit for the 4th nine weeks and it's all about non-fiction.  Informative writing apparently has many names, I have heard it called expository, informative and informational.  Whatever you chose to call it, we have been working on it this week.  To make it a little bit more fun, we have been creating mini-books! All you need to make a mini-book is 5 index cards and one rubber band.  I cut little slits to make the rubber band hold it tightly (pictures of the books are a little further down).  Before we get to the mini-books, first we talked about how writers do research before they write.  We broke out a lot of non-fiction text so they could research some topics and choose one to write about. 

A few years ago I had a grandparent/former teacher donate a whole set of these books.  We have used them for many things this year in ELA and writing.  

Sorry for the glare, but lamination does not like the camera!  I have saved extra copies of Weekly Readers/Scholastic News from years past. 

This year I have worked on my non-fiction classroom library since with the CCSS we are reading a lot more non-fiction text.  Most are from Scholastic and I've gotten them for free using my points.

After we read about a few non-fiction topics and chose what we wanted to write about, we set some ground rules for our mini-books.

We are also continuing to learn about non-fiction text features in literacy using THIS, THIS, THIS and THIS, so you can see that they had to include several in their mini-books.  I think adding the text features was their favorite part, I kept hearing "Come check out my keywords" or "Look at my table of contents!"  The next few pictures are a few examples from their mini-books.  We aren't done yet, but I think they're going to turn out great!!  They are so into it! Pay no attention to the capitalization, punctuation and spelling...I am trying to focus on content before editing : )

I know I'm biased but I'm pretty impressed with their books so far, I love how they used text features, especially the keywords they chose. You can see a little bit of our Plants Unit in there too.  : )